3 Website Traffic Boosters No One Talks About

If I asked you if you’d like more traffic to your website, you’d say, “Yes, please!”, right?

I mean, who doesn’t want more traffic to their website?

More of the right kind of traffic means more people seeing what you have to offer, more people signing up for your newsletter, and more people buying your product or services.

Who doesn’t want that?

But how do you go about getting more traffic to your website?

I feel like the only thing people talk about these days is doing guest posts.

And guest posts are great, but since it seems like EVERYONE is doing them or talking about doing them, it starts to become a bit of a saturated and over-used tactic.

So what can you do instead? Well, here are just three ideas for building traffic to your website that are a little more creative.

Three Website Traffic Boosters No One Talks About

1. Create a scholarship

Not just any scholarship. Create a scholarship that fits your ideal customer or that your ideal customer would support.

If you’re a college admissions consultant, this one would of course be a good fit. But that’s not the only kind of small business that can benefit from creating a scholarship.

Do you sell gourmet kitchen supplies? Create a scholarship for a local culinary school or camp.

Do you teach graphic designers how to build a business? Create a scholarship for budding graphic designers to take a graphic design program from the college of their choosing or online from one of your own choosing.

No, it doesn’t have to be a full scholarship.

But it CAN be an easy way to get a link (and traffic) from university or college sites that do round-ups of scholarships. University websites tend to be seen as trusted & strong by The Google so it can be a great link to get to improve Google’s opinion of your own site.

And if you can tie it in to your ideal client, the traffic bump will be all the better.

Can’t seem to get the college idea to jive with your idea client’s needs?

Do your ideal clients have a professional conference on their wishlists? Create a scholarship to fund their attendance.

Oh – the secret here is then GO AND TELL everyone about your scholarship and encourage them to spread the word 🙂

2. Give away something amazing…for free

It’s hard to get people to write about or share something their audience has to pay for, right? You know what’s easy? Getting people to write about or share something AMAZING their audience can get FOR FREE.

Ramit Sethi who teaches wannabe freelancers how to get their first $1,000 on the side has the perfect amazing free tool for offer: a free idea generator tool which solves his would-be clients #1 problem – what to offer clients as a freelancer.

Not only is it an awesome free tool, but it lines up perfectly with his product offering, Earn1K. And it just so happens, it’s where I point ANYONE who asks me how to get started as a freelancer.

The key here is to create something awesome that ALSO aligns with your ideal client. This ensures any traffic bump you get from your awesome thing is 100% quality traffic who will also be interested in what you have to offer. Which is the point, right?

3. Get some really relevant press

I’m not talking about a link from The New York Times (though of course, who wouldn’t want one of those?) – I’m talking about a link from a top site that only your ideal audience follows.

Are you a pillow designer? Maybe a link from Apartment Therapy would give you a lot of awesome traffic.

Are you a virtual assistant? Maybe a link from Entrepreneur.com would give you tons of targeted traffic.

Are you a weight loss coach? Maybe a link from CookingLight.com would be a great source of ideal client traffic.

But how do you get this really relevant press? Sure you could hire a PR consultant if you have the budget.

But what if you don’t have the budget? And need a DIY solution?

One simple way to get more press is get yourself on the Help-A-Reporter-Out (HARO) list. It’s a daily (or weekly – your choice) email of reporters looking for sources for various stories.

All you need to do is respond to requests that are SUPER relevant to your ideal clients. Not every response will work out, but the ones that do will be an incredibly high quality bump of traffic.

Your turn

What creative traffic building ideas do you have? Like any of the ones on this list? Let me know in the comments!

Liz Lockard is a small business SEO and Marketing coach for real people. She helps small businesses who are awesome at what they do get more of their ideal clients knocking on their virtual door. If you want to get way more of your ideal client traffic to your website, sign up here to be the first to hear about free upcoming SEO training & the insider deets on her upcoming Your SEO Roadmap course.

Great tips – and I’m laughing because I’ve had “sign up to HARO” on my to-do list for weeks now! I’m not quite sure why on earth I’ve been dragging my feet on this one, but your easy to click through link was what it finally took! Thank you 🙂

Liz,
I can’t believe you told the best kept secrets for driving traffic to your site! I epically love the scholarship one, the HARO emails by far have been the best traffic drivers for my site but I have yet to implement the scholarship ideas!!

Great tips, Liz. HARO is terrific tool and the trick is not to give up too quickly. I have found that lots of clients try it out for a week or so and then decide it isn’t worth their time, but if you are consistent in responding to relevant queries you can often reap rewards. I also talk about something called the reverse guest post on my site and it’s a great tactic for getting relevant links back to your site.